Some businesses should not buy a website yet. A stage-by-stage look at web spending, from the free profile that covers a brand-new shop to the week a real site starts earning its keep.
I build websites for a living, which means everything below comes from a person with something to sell you. So let me start with the sentence that costs me money: some businesses should not buy a website yet. If yours is one of them, I would rather say so up front than take $500 and hand you a page that sits unread while you wrestle with payroll.
Owners usually ask me some version of "should I get a website," and that framing hides the real decision, because the answer to it is nearly always a soft yes. Almost anything helps a little. The sharper question is where your business is in its life, because the right amount to spend online changes as a business grows, and at the earliest stage the right amount is close to zero.
If your doors opened recently, the internet needs a small set of facts about you: that you exist, where you are, and when you are open.
A free Google Business Profile covers all of it. That profile is the box that appears when someone nearby searches for your kind of business, and it carries your hours and phone number along with photos and reviews. Claiming it and filling it out takes an evening, costs nothing, and does more for a brand-new shop than most paid websites would, because at this stage almost nobody is searching for your name. They are searching for what you do, and the profile is how you show up for that.
If you want a website on top of the profile, a free one-page site from any of the big builders is honestly fine for now. Put your name on it, a photo of the real place, the hours, and a phone number that works. Nobody judges a six-week-old business for having a plain page, and plenty of customers will find it reassuring that the basics are simply there.
The reason to stop at that point is not that websites are useless early. It is that money in a new business has heavier jobs waiting for it, and a designer's invoice can wait until customers start showing up with questions.
There is a specific moment when a website stops being decoration and becomes a tool, and it usually announces itself over the phone.
The calls start sounding alike. Someone wants to know what time you close on Sundays. Someone else asks whether you still carry the thing they saw on your Facebook page last month. Each call takes a minute or two out of somebody's working day, and every one of them is a question a page could have answered at 11 p.m. while you slept.
This is the stage where a website starts paying for itself, because it takes over work you are already doing by hand. Hours, prices, what you carry, how to get a quote: once those answers live on pages, the calls that remain begin much closer to "I'm on my way."
This is also where I usually come in, so here are my numbers where you can check them against your own phone log. The basic build is $500 flat and takes about a week. After that, $25 a month covers hosting with small edits included. At this stage of a business, that math either clears or it does not, and your call volume is the evidence either way.
The third stage arrives quietly. You built a site yourself a few years back, or a relative did, and it served well enough until what you sell got too big or began changing too fast for it.
Maybe you carry hundreds of items and the site names none of them, or prices move weekly while the site still shows last winter's. A simple update means hunting down the login and relearning an editor you touch twice a year, and a whole evening disappears into a task that a person who does this daily would finish before lunch.
At that point the question is no longer whether you can maintain the site yourself. You clearly can, since you have been doing it. The question is whether your evenings are the cheapest way to get the work done, and for a busy owner they rarely are. On my plans, changes bigger than the included small edits run $30 an hour, and an hour of mine tends to replace an evening of yours.
If what you sell is many and specific, this stage has a whole approach of its own, and I wrote about it separately: what productizing means for a local business.
Strip all of it down to one check. Look back at last week and count the moments the internet cost you something, like a call you answered for the third time, or a customer who did not know you carried the thing they ended up buying somewhere else.
If you counted zero, you are early. The free profile plus a plain page is the right spend, and a designer's number can live in a drawer for later. Anyone who tells you otherwise is selling past the point where the product helps, and you should hold on to your $500 until it has real work to do.
If you counted a few, the site already has a job waiting, and every week without one quietly bills you in repeated answers and missed customers. Watch for the week your phone starts asking for help. That is the signal, and it is a better one than any revenue milestone.
Tell me what you're building. I'll come back with a plan for what the site should actually do.